This plea for a critical archaeology begins with Walter Benjamin's reflection on the relationship between the present day and the construction of the past. From there it develops some thoughts about the impact of current political, economic and social interests as well as prevailing Lebenswelten on our views of history. Despite the experiences with German archaeology during the Third Reich, such an approach has received comparatively little attention. Rather, in the postwar period there was a tendency to take refuge in a mostly positivist and thus supposedly apolitical, objective archaeology, which raised decontextualized knowledge production to the status of dogma without exposing it as the result of a modernist ideology or recognizing political praxis in both archaeology and other disciplines. In my opinion the subject of a critical archaeology should be the production of archaeological knowledge and the calling into question of the present-day constructions and categorizations of our late-capitalist, neo-liberal world. It is not about producing better, more reliable knowledge. Rather, it is about the emergence of a critical consciousness with regard to the social foundations of knowledge and the highlighting of new alternative and previously non-dominant discourses. Some examples of spheres of archaeological knowledge production that would be worth investigating are touched upon in order to speak in favor of a critical archaeology that makes these important issues its central task.
